Thanks to the hard work of Argenti Aertheri and the suggestions of various other Boobzers, the Man Boobz survey is now up and ready to be taken. It will give me — and all of you — a better picture of just what sort of people read Man Boobz on a regular basis. It’s completely anonymous. Go take it! It will only take a few minutes.
I will probably leave it up for a couple of days, and will report the results here as soon as the numbers are crunched.
I think pretty much any other question you might have about it will probably be answered on the survey itself, so hop to it!
Thanks Argenti!
I have been a lurker for ages too, mostly because I don’t feel my english is good enough to actively take part in the conversation around here, although I really like too read the comments. This blog/commentsection has positively changed a lot of my views or rather enabled me to articulate them better (in my own language that is). So… greetings from germany, I guess, and from five petrats, who appreciate that they were mentioned in the survey. 🙂
I just took the survey and had some problems with the terminology, but that’s because I’m not familiar with the anglosachsian educationsystem (and some other terminology). Had to look that up. Otherwise, very nicely done.
Thank you Argenti for doing this! I’m looking forward to seeing the results 😀
I have been a lurker for ages too, mostly because I don’t feel my english is good enough to actively take part in the conversation around here, although I really like too read the comments. This blog/commentsection has positively changed a lot of my views or rather enabled me to articulate them better (in my own language that is). So… greetings from germany, I guess, and from five petrats, who appreciate that they were mentioned in the survey. 🙂
I just took the survey and had some problems with the terminology, but that’s because I’m not familiar with the anglosachsian educationsystem (and some other terminology, not being a native speaker and all that). Otherwise, very nicely done.
Thank you Argenti! That was fun and should be interesting.
Did it. Am /really/ surprised at how inclusive it is, jeez. I was completely delighted when I saw “black – caribbean” since my mom’s jamaican. A bit /too/ inclusive though, I’m not sure you’ll find many third positionist gray A’s.
Perfect way to illustrate Brit versus American ideas about class – would you consider Kate Middleton, prior to her en-royaling, to have been upper class? If you say yes then you’re probably not British. If you sneer and say “wisteria sisters” then you’re probably a toff.
I took the survey! Thanks, Argenti, for all of your hard work.
Not to be an ass, but there’s a “working poor” definition that doesn’t have a matching radio button. Maybe I didn’t read closely enough.
And I chose “Other US Liberal” and then came here and read the comments, and I think I’m more Social Democrat than US Liberal. Oops.
It’s just whenever some wanker on the Net goes LIEberals!! I take it to mean my group.
Very impressive as surveys go, a lot of thought clearly went into it and it handles issues well. My only quibble would be ethnicity. In the United States I’m White-Other as no subcategory offered ever fits. In Europe I’m not white and the countries that include my specific ethnicity usually have a very unpleasant attitude towards my particular ethnic group.
Ah, the joys of being Romany.
I guess with enough boxes one could mark oneself down as white/non-white/Indian/Eastern European/film-literary stereotype performer-local color-theif/untermensch… a lot of boxes….
Bravo, Argenti! Standing ovation for all your hard work.
And yes, questions about class are difficult when comparing different countries, and different regions within countries, because some places have higher costs of living. So a person could be middle class in rural Kansas, but in poverty in New York City. It also changes things if someone has dependent children or elderly parents in the house to support. That’s why in the US, applications for social services and tax forms ask how many children you have. A person could be upper middle class if zie lives alone, but be poor if zie has a lot of children.
But it would be impossible to have all of those factors in a quick, informal survey.
Thanks Argenti. I have answered even though I’m Brazilian, I hope that’s ok.
Here’s what I love about my manboobz: Even answering a simple questionnaire made me think about a lot of things. The questions were US-centric, so I declared myself hispanic…I think people from US and Brit would see me and think “hispanic”, but people from my country see me as a white person, I don’t perceive myself as white, though…More like a little bit of everything (my father was not white; my mother’s family was Portuguese, but part of it came from the “Arab side”…). It’s so subjective and I don’t know why people care about it so much, even in places like Brazil, where the people is so diverse…
I can’t think of any way to account for regional differences in cost of living other than having a complicated back end system that changes the numbers based on zip code. For example, I think it rated 35 to about 60 or 70 K as middle class? In the Bay Area 35K doesn’t even come close to providing what most people would consider a middle class standard of life.There’s a reason the minimum wage in San Francisco is over $10 an hour.
>Though actually it would be tricky to do a survey based on UK ideas of class for an international audience.
We already have US race ideas in there, which, as Caml already mentioned, seem very clunky and inappropriate to people of other nations.
You know, I’ve traveled a lot (3rd Culture kid), and I’ve found the British and American ways of framing class to be about equally common internationally.
Done and done. Got no help from my cats. Obviously a lot of thought and work went into this survey.
I took the survey. Very impressive work, Argenti.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, with all that talk of class, I need to go watch some Downton Abbey 🙂
I didn’t really know what “white, other” meant. I’m like 95% Scandinavian, and 5% Native American. I just put European white, so sorry if I’m actually other white since idk what that meant…
Thank you so much; this was a lot of work. I’m really interested in seeing the results.
I especially liked that I was encouraged to re-examine my political and religious beliefs when attempting to find apt descriptors.
Very very occasional commenter here, popping in to say I loved the breakdown on the ethnicity question! I work on a scholarship program, and I thought our application had a pretty good list of race/ethnicity options – but this one puts ours to shame. Well done! In response to auggziliary, there isn’t really a “right” answer for race and ethnicity – if “White, European” works for you, it doesn’t matter what you are genetically or in any other way. I could see some people of Jewish or Roma heritage preferring “White, Other,” since Jews and the Roma have certainly historically been marginalized and othered in Europe. Also a good way for a person of other Middle Eastern descent to indicate that they present as/identify as white (though they’d likely also check “Middle Eastern”).
Delurking. Very impressive survey. I had to go look up some of the parody religions. One small nitpick — #23 should have “effect” everywhere you have “affect.” I answered it anyway. Enjoy your results!
You and me both, Falconer. Of course, my problem was that I couldn’t be arsed to look up all those terms at the time I was filling it out. My own fault.
Donezo
Nice work. I bet that took some time.
@Cami
Yeah, I’m a Brazilian-American and we’re not Hispanic, since that specifically means Spanish speaking. I requested Latina as an option, since that generally means “from Latin or South America, non-Spanish speaking regions included”.
I wish under sexuality there was an ‘idk’ option
@Cami, it’s interesting, Hispanic as an ethnicity is virtually non-existent in Europe, since it refers to an ethnicity that developed in North and South America.
Brits probably wouldn’t label you as Hispanic as we don’t come across Hispanic people often enough to even know what they might commonly look like.
People from Spain are not Hispanic, despite what people assumed when there was that whole fiasco over Disney’s creation of Princess Sophia.
People assumed she was supposed to be half Hispanic as her Father was from a fictional country based on Spain. And then were annoyed that she didn’t “look” Hispanic.
Well of course not, people from Spain aren’t Hispanic, and a majority of that population would consider themselves white. But a US-centric point of view holds that Spanish-speaking=Hispanic.